Blog dedicado a la formación en todos sus ámbitos: presencial, online, a distancia
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Una infografía sobre las 2 caras de Spotify. Vía
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Las 2 caras de Spotify
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Una infografía sobre Big Data en Latinoamérica. Vía
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Big Data en Latinoamérica
(Z88.3 on Facebook)
The customers who shared their ticket with the world also said that their waitress had told them, “Just so you know, we gave you a 15 percent discount for praying.” Not for “being grateful” or “enjoying your meal” or “saying nice things to the cook.” Of course, for all the restaurant owner knew, customers could be praying to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which should always be done before eating pasta in any form.
However, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, an atheist group, was not impressed with this discount. The foundation’s staff attorney sent the diner a letter pointing out that offering a discount to customers who visibly or audibly “pray” at some point during their meal is a violation of the federal Civil Rights Act.
A restaurant, after all, is a place of “public accommodation.” The Civil Rights Act requires restaurants to be available for “full and equal enjoyment” of all customers. Everyone who walks in the door should be treated equally. The diner, however, has left a paper trail of offering discounts to customers who practice a religion that includes public prayer, and excludes people who are non-religious or who simply prefer not to pray in public. “Any promotions must be available to all customers regardless of religious preference or practice on a non-discriminatory basis,” the letter pointed out.
In an e-mail to the FFRF, the diner’s owner (yes, she’s named Mary) responded by saying that she will end the discount.
We at Mary’s value the support of ALL our fellow Americans. While you may exercise your right of religious freedom at this restaurant by praying over your meal to any entity or non-entity, we must protect your freedom from religion in a public place. We are no longer issuing the 15% praying in public discount. It is illegal and we are being threatened by lawsuit. We apologize to our community for any offense this discount has incurred.
The sign indicates that the restaurant still doesn’t quite get it: the problem isn’t protecting people from public displays of religion, but giving preferential treatment and better prices to people who practice some religion, but not people who practice others, or who have no religion at all.
Here at Consumerist headquarters, we will get back to worshipping this burger that the diner recently posted on its Facebook page.
Winston-Salem’s Mary’s Gourmet Diner drops prayer discount [News & Record]
Diner Stops ‘Praying In Public’ Discount After Atheist Group Threatens Lawsuit [CBS Charlotte]
Hola:
Una infografía con 10 frases motivadoras para los negocios.
Un saludo
10 frases motivadoras para los negocios
Sprint Chairman Masayoshi Son, whose SoftBank gained control of America’s third-biggest wireless company in 2013, today described incoming Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure as a “street fighter” with a face “like a bandit.”
“He is a man who has a very similar culture to SoftBank,” said Son.
Claure is the billionaire founder of Miami-based Brightstar, a wireless wholesaler that was also recently acquired by SoftBank.
“When he came to the U.S., he had only $100 in his pocket and then he made a company with sales of 1 trillion yen,” said Son. “In that sense, he is the street fighter.”
Son confirmed Claure’s comments from earlier this week that his focus is on Sprint’s costs. He also said that the new CEO is working on new pricing plans for the company.
“Without the ability to compete on scale they are going to have to compete on price,” an analyst from Moody’s tells Reuters about the position that Sprint and T-Mobile find themselves in. “The two smaller competitors may become increasingly desperate to maintain market share and could become irrational in pricing, which could cause disruptions in pricing in the industry.”
The question is whether or not Sprint, which has failed to make much of a dent with either its aborted early upgrade plan or its Framily group plans, has the leverage to launch or endure a price war.
“Domestic competition among mobile carriers is fierce, but I don’t think it will get much worse,” another analyst tells Bloomberg.
T-Mobile has been trying to disrupt the industry since its merger with AT&T fell apart. And while it has gained millions of new subscribers, there are those who question the company’s ability to maintain its pricing model in the long run.
And yet, others in the industry — especially AT&T — have responded to T-Mobile’s changes, nudging customers into plans where they save money by paying full price for their phones.
But the big difference between T-Mobile and Sprint right now is that T-Mobile’s network investments are paying off. As we talked about yesterday, the company may be exaggerating the performance of its LTE network, but not by too much. Meanwhile, those same tests show that Sprint is by far the slowest of the four major providers.
So will AT&T and Verizon, or even T-Mobile, care if Sprint drops its price? Possibly not, unless Sprint can demonstrate drastic, widespread improvements in its network.
As the way things stand right now, Sprint trying to goad its competition into a price war would be like Amtrak trying to convince airline passengers to switch.
One new study finds that up to half the time teenage drivers are on their phones while at the wheel, parents are on the other end, HealthDay reports.
Parents themselves are also often on the phone while driving, and not modeling good car behavior for their kids, the study authors note. But even so, they were surprised by the findings.
Teenage drivers know not to call their friends when they first get licensed, the study found, but that doesn’t apply to family. In in-person interviews with 13 teenagers, the researchers found that every single one of them who admitted to using their phone while driving said they had spoken with their parents — but only 20% admitted to speaking with friends.
The next stage of the research involved 400 drivers ages 15 to 18. Among the teens with learner’s permits, 57% used a phone while driving. The move from permit to license makes it worse: 71% of the 16- and 17-year-olds with unrestricted licenses used phones while driving. And among the 18-year-olds, 90% admitted to phone use while driving.
Over one third of the 15-17-year-old drivers said they spoke with parents while driving, and over 50% of the 18-year-old drivers did, the survey found.
The teenage drivers told the researchers they were in something of a Catch-22 situation: parents don’t want their teenage children using phones while they drive, but then parents whose kids don’t answer when they call may get angry that their kids aren’t being responsive.
In the end, the key to getting kids to cut back on phone use while driving really does lie with mom and dad, but it’s not just about how much they call. It’s about their own dangerous habits, says Jonathan Adkins, executive director of Governors Highway Safety Association. “The message here has to be to parents to stop driving distracted themselves and to set ground rules for teens that they should not be using the phone while driving,” Adkins told HealthDay. “Teens follow what their parents do, not what they say.”
Distracted Teen Drivers Often on Cellphone With Parent: Study [HealthDay]
“‘All the kids do it’ was never something that worked with me when I was growing up and didn’t work with my kids,” explained Wheeler at a press conference earlier today.
Wheeler, a former front man for the wireless industry, accused Verizon of trying to “reframe the issue” rather than responding to the questions he raised about whether or not Verizon’s “Network Optimization” program — which throttles data speeds for its highest-use subscribers when they are connected to high-traffic cell sites — is trying to use the excuse of network congestion to compel unlimited subscribers to switch to tiered data plans that charge overage fees.
“My concern in this instance is that it is moving from technology and engineering issues into business issues,” he explained. “Such as choosing between different subscribers based on your economic relationship with them.”
In his original letter to Verizon Wireless CEO Daniel “I’ve got a need, a need for” Mead, Wheeler pointed out that the FCC rules do allow for wireless companies to do “reasonable network management,” for purposes of “reducing or mitigating the effects of congestion on the network,” but warned the company that network management “is not a loophole designed to enhance your revenue streams.”
Verizon’s response had argued that its competitors are involved in similar throttling programs. Furthermore, the company claims that it’s not about pushing users into a tiered data plan, it’s about getting data hogs to back off when things are busy.
Meanwhile, the folks at advocacy group Public Knowledge recently accused all Verizon and its competition — AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint — of failing to follow FCC guidelines for transparency with regard to their respective throttling programs.
We would be shocked if there’s anyone in the world who actually wants 17 pounds’ worth of glossy Restoration Hardware catalogs. Since the doorstops first began hitting doorsteps back in May, though, more catalog recipients who value the environment and the lower backs of delivery personnel have been speaking out.
We learned from the New Yorker that a tiny anti-Restoration Hardware revolt has been slowly spreading. Most people sighed and tossed them out, and some people just tweeted about it before sending the catalogs off for recycling, but other responses were truly inspired.
Our favorite protest had to be the one in Palo Alto, California, where volunteers collected 2,000 pounds’ worth of the catalogs from the nearby towns of Woodside and Portola Valley and stacked them in front of the company’s store in Palo Alto. “They’re counting on people having really busy lives and not really thinking about it,” local environmental activist and new Consumerist hero Nancy Reyering told Palo Alto Weekly.
The magazine describes their delivery from the scene: store employees hauled off stacks of catalogs as quickly as they could, asking the volunteers to please deliver them to the back loading dock. What, and defeat the entire point of the protest?
The catalogs were shipped via UPS. While Restoration Hardware boasted that it had purchased carbon offsets from UPS to make up for the miles driven to drop off the catalogs, it had failed to purchase back pain offsets and frustration offsets for employees stuck delivering the catalogs.
At least one nice thing came out of the catalog onslaight: people had a lot of fun finding ways to recycle the catalogs other than tossing them in the recycling bin, such as creating cat food stands and turning the glossy pages into pretty, glossy paper-bead jewelry.
Restoration Hardware’s Mail-Order Extravagance [New Yorker]
10 Alternate Uses for the 17 Pound Restoration Hardware Catalog [Old Town Home]
In her explanation of why it was time to investigate the need for blackouts, then-acting FCC Chair Mignon Clyburn said that “Changes in the marketplace have raised questions about whether these rules are still in the public interest, particularly at a time when high ticket prices and the economy make it difficult for many sports fans to attend games.”
But in a letter [PDF] sent earlier this the FCC, the NFL’s lawyers recount a recent meeting between league reps and a legal advisor to FCC Chair Tom Wheeler.
The reps explained the NFL’s blackout rule “serves to balance the League’s two objectives of maximizing the in-stadium experience and engaging our fans through various media platforms.”
In 2012, the NFL revised the rule to lower the bar for what is considered a “sellout” to mean that only 85% of seats need to be sold. This allowed big-market teams to expand seating in their stadium without having to worry about a blackout and gave smaller-market teams some breathing room before having to flip the blackout switch.
“[T]he number of blackouts has dropped dramatically and attendance and viewership have increased over the past few decades,” reads the letter, “the blackout rule has been a critical contributing factor to that success.”
The NFL reps also argued that the blackout rule “benefits the fans, because… the policy helps to keep NFL games on free broadcast television.”
And in case the FCC didn’t get the not-at-all-subtle subtext of that statement, the letter explains that “the current system clearly serves the public interest by making professional football games available to the estimated 60 million Americans who rely on free TV for their access to broadcast programming… if the current system were changed and NFL gams were to move to pay-TV, fans who wanted to watch their home team would have to pay a $60-$80 fee per month… That result would represent a substantial loss of consumer welfare.”
Yup, that was the NFL effectively telling the FCC that if it does away with the sports blackout rule, it will take its broadcasts over to cable.
There is much debate as to whether that would be a sound idea for the league. NFL games are often among the highest rated broadcasts of any week. Meanwhile, cable ratings for Thursday Night are generally poor by comparison and the success of Monday Night Football on ESPN seems to relate directly to the interest in the two teams playing each week.
Additionally, ratings would likely be split as each game would likely be aired by regional sports networks from each of the two markets involved. For example, if the Patriots play the Eagles in Philadelphia on a Sunday afternoon, CBS’s national team would carry the game in those two markets, along with spreading it out to other markets that may be interested. CBS is also selling ads, not just against the Pats/Eagles match-up but against all of the NFL games it airs at the same time.
If you move that to cable and follow the model that’s been set up by other sports leagues, things would be much different. Suddenly, it’s not one pair of national CBS broadcasters calling a game that airs in various markets. Instead, it’s a Philadelphia regional sports network airing their broadcast to the local market and a Boston regional sports net doing the same for local Pats fans. These are broadcasts that would not be available to people without cable packages and may not even be available from all cable providers in each market.
(Once again, I point to the current nonsense in Houston and Los Angeles, where most of the market is unable to watch baseball because greedy regional sports nets refuse to make deals with other carriers. The NFL doesn’t have the luxury of 162 game seasons to wait out such disputes.)
Even if you combined the ratings for the two networks, they would likely be smaller than the single rating for the same game aired on CBS. And neither sports net will be able to generate the ad revenue that a national over-the-air network can.
The ratings for Thursday Night Football have been so bad that the league had to partner with CBS to simulcast most Thursday games this season, just to try to build an audience. If the league can’t make a go of the country’s most popular televised sport during a prime-time broadcast on a national cable channel available to most pay-TV subscribers, then this threat of a wholesale shift to pay-TV seems like a bluff.
Given that the NFL is riding high on solid attendance, and enough fans are coming out every Sunday regardless of how poorly their team is doing, why does the NFL care so much about this 39-year-old blackout rule that only affects enough games to count on your hands?
It may have something to do with rumors that the league is looking to expand the number of games it airs outside of the traditional Sunday afternoon. Perhaps the team is worried that the threat of blackouts is the only way to get butts in seats if it airs games that compete with high school games on Friday or college games on Saturday?
And of course there is always that growing threat of the home theater, with a TV larger than a fan-a-vision and a sound system louder than the stadium PA. Any fan can trick out their basement for less than it would cost to take the family to the game.
